An Archive of Virginia Indian Heritage

Browse Exhibits
tagged "segregation" (2 total)

Henry Jackson Davis was an educator by trade. He served as principal of public schools in Williamsburg and Marion and as superintendent of public schools in Henrico County. From 1910 until 1915 he served as State Agent for Negro Rural Schools, which required him to travel around the state inspecting—and documenting—the conditions of minority schools, including the schools for Virginia Indians.

For thousands of years, indigenous peoples in the Americas educated their children by example and used stories to transmit knowledge and social values. When the English arrived at Jamestown in 1607, they assumed that their own cultural practices and religious beliefs were superior to those of Native peoples, and they believed it their duty to educate Indians according to English traditions and to instruct them in the Christian faith. In so doing, they hoped to create Indian teachers and missionaries who would work among their own people to eliminate “savage behavior” and replace it with English attitudes.

The first institute for Indians in Virginia was the Brafferton School at the College of William and Mary. It was followed a century later by an American Indian program at the Hampton Normal School. Both programs required the Indian students to relocate far from home, and neither program incorporated Native perspectives into its policies or curricula.

During the 20th century, many Virginia Indian students attended primary schools that were operated by church missions established in their local areas. Because secondary schools for Indians did not exist in Virginia, many students attended federal Indian boarding schools as far away as Bacone Indian University in Oklahoma. When schools across the country were desegregated in the 1960s, Virginia Indians entered public schools and gained access to higher education.

Featured Item

This engraving, taken from life, shows an American Indian man wearing a necklace, earrings, and head ornaments. The inscription in the upper left reads, "Unus Americanus ex Virginia" (an American from Virginia), a place name that early in the seventeenth century referred to much of both present-day Virginia and New England. In 1996, the scholar George R. Hamell identified the man as Jacques, an…